Video Del Fuego, Part XLV

I've been unavoidably detained by my paying gig, but I should be back to something like a normal schedule shortly. In the meantime, there are a couple of May/June 50th Anniversaries worth noting.

Frank Sinatra once said, "Miles Davis never wasted a note, boy, or a word on a fool." He was right. Roughly fifty years ago this summer, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue. And every note is exactly where it should be.



Fifty years later, artists all over are still covering it:



Also about fifty years ago, not quite a month after Yuri Gagarin's first orbital flight, Alan Shepard became the first American to enter space with the flight of Freedom 7. The Atlas rocket that would eventually take Mercury into orbit wasn't quite ready yet (it had an unfortunate tendency to try to burn all of its fuel at the same time) so the first couple of flights used the smaller Redstone missile.



So far as I'm aware, no one's ever attempted a "cover" version of Mercury, which is probably for the best.